The CSSSA College Connection Visits Bennington College

Meet Isabel, CSSSA 2012

Los Angeles native Isabel Wing attended the California State Summer School for the Arts (CSSSA) music program in 2012. If you asked her in high school if she would end up in rural Vermont for college she would have said it wasn’t even on her radar. Isabel came to CSSSA when she ran across an advertisement for the highly selective summer program in a magazine, decided to apply, and was accepted.

“…I was in a program with other singers who were there for singing and not just theater…and then I was surrounded by jazz musicians and I had no experience with jazz…it was just very eye opening.”

The CSSSA Foundation’s CSSSA College Connection is a web-series featuring CSSSA alumni in their college setting. Currently a freshman at Bennington College in Vermont, I was able to catch up with Isabel on a beautiful fall day and talk with her about the college application process which admittedly can be a bit challenging and filled with highs and lows. Initially, Isabel said, “I had this sort of vision of me going to USC because I really liked their popular music program and I met with them at the CSSSA college fair…I had them as the dream school, which didn’t end up happening.”

Although USC didn’t pan out and felt like a step backward at the time, it actually was a step forward for Isabel, leading her down the road that lay ahead. She eventually ended up taking a year off after high school, moving to Nashville and then kept moving east cross-country to attend Bennington, whose music program she says, “is exactly what I wanted.”

The CSSSA Foundation’s CSSSA College Connection is a web-series featuring CSSSA alumni in their college setting. The series is about the human element of connection, providing peer-to-peer insight regarding the college process in the context of the arch of an individual’s life journey.

Brennan Dignan is the Bridge to College Director for the California State Summer School Arts Foundation where he develops programming aimed at getting students to, through, and beyond college. The Bridge to College program is grounded in the idea that the right student in the right place studying the right thing will set them up for a lifetime of success. He studied music composition at the University of Idaho and currently resides in Los Angeles, CA.

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